Conspicuous consumption of music, live and otherwise.

February 17, 2016

Last night I had the welcome and happy opportunity to interview Ben Ratliff, the New York Times music critic and a longtime friend and colleague, for an attentive audience at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge. The subject was Ben's new book, Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty, a fascinating, idiosyncratic, and eminently readable new kind of "music appreciation" guide for a time when it seems as if every note and mote ever composed or intoned by humans is available at the click of a mouse.

I won't be reviewing Ben's book officially, and unfortunately I don't have a transcript of the conversation, though I'll recommend that you read this Q&A with Ben conducted by Matthew Guerrieri for the Boston Globe. But what I can share is the script I wrote for myself to introduce Ben last night, which should convey both a strong sense of my esteem and affection for Ben as well as my fascination with his newest book.

==============================

I’ve known Ben Ratliff for something close to 20 years now, as a colleague, a friend, a sounding board, and, not least, as a writer whose work regularly constitutes destination reading for me. So many times, followers of my personal blog, my Twitter feed, my Facebook wall, and other pliable surfaces have read these words: “The best Ben Ratliff is the best.” That’s a tag I’ve used every time something that he has written – more often than not for The New York Times – has stopped me dead in my tracks.

As a prose stylist, he crafts lines and paragraphs of lapidary brilliance, then sets them in a context so unpretentious and conversational that even his most high-flown ideas can seem like personal confidences. As a listener, he has almost no rivals that I know of; routinely what Ben writes about music makes me want to hear not just what he’s heard, but with the aural and intellectual apparatus through which he heard it.

Which brings us to here and now and this book, Every Song Ever – a title that’s somehow both fantastical and commonsensical at once. Personally, I’ve found it a hard book to read – not because the thinking is abstract or its rendering esoteric, but because line after line, paragraph after paragraph contains thoughts about music so elegantly conceived, so succinctly stated, and so handsomely described that I want to hear it for myself, then and there, with Ben’s words still echoing in my mind’s ear.

On page after page I encountered lines that jolted me with plainspoken provocation. Here’s one, from page 113, about what happened when the salsa singer Marc Anthony signed to Sony: “Most of his new records no longer had much mystery in them. They had less middle, less tradition to engage with or argue against. Real pop destroys middles and traditions. (That is not a value judgement; that is pop’s job.)”

And onward: “Metal is the fanatical generation of myth – it’s all inverse gospel, and the code for listening to it is as complex as gospel’s.” Or, about the virtuoso performer: “They are the son-et-lumière projected onto the pyramids of Giza, a facsimile of inspirational awe set against slow millennia of learning and understanding.”

Ben connects and contextualizes Mozart and Bob Wills, Coltrane and Robert Johnson, João Gilberto and Morton Feldman, Domenico Scarlatti and Outkast. He does it in a way that feels natural and right and inevitable, never ostentatious or merely absurd. He calls “Party in the U.S.A.” by Miley Cyrus “a song about listening: one of the greatest ever made,” and if you don’t believe him at face value, you trust him enough to examine the possibility, at least.

At its rock-bottom simplest, the core concern of Every Song Ever is this: When faced with what seems like close to the whole of human musical creative history available to be tapped day and night in seemingly endless streams and torrents – I use that latter word advisedly – how can we start to make sense of it all?

And when computer algorithms are in place to learn our tastes in order to better predict and commodify them, how can we assert our independence, taking responsibility unto ourselves for what we hear, how we process and relate what we hear, and how we hold onto those processes as something that can and should be intensely personal, even as it has the capacity to also be profoundly communal?

I don’t know the answers to any of these questions, but I do know that there is no one I’d rather have as my guide than Ben Ratliff.

June 22, 2014

The fifth installment in the three-part [sic] series "Days between," compiling my unblogged recent work for The New York Times, and – for reasons I expect to be fairly obvious – the final installment for the foreseeable future. The end of a run that meant the world to me. As ever and as applicable, the performance date is provided first, followed by the publication date.

The performance was both heady and bedeviling. Steady bursts at dance club tempos prompted physical responses, stymied by an asymmetrical flux. Twice, a man in a white rabbit suit trudged across the room, his listless presence mirroring the music’s hampered hedonism.

Meant to suggest makeshift Brazilian shantytowns and the disparate individual stories contained therein, the piece offers a dreamlike progression of erratic bumps and scrapes, loosely fastened with repeated gently rising glissandos in a manner at times reminiscent of Varèse.

Jeffrey Mumford, a distinguished American composer who studied with Elliott Carter and Bernard Rands, among others, has an unerring knack for fashioning rigorous works as changeable as cloudscapes, bursting with color, nuance and poetry.

Even absent, the composer was the ghost in the machine — not least as a topic finally rendered explicit. And for those who never witnessed him, this was a faithful representation of his style and intent.

It seemed impossible that the finale, Hikari Kiyama’s “Joruri Death Metal,” could live up to its promised collision of modern complexity, Japanese dramatic tradition and the flamboyant violence of death metal.

I find in full measure the same characteristics that made “Sirens” so captivating: keen intelligence; lacerating wit; a time-traipsing style with extravagant sounds extracted from frugal resources; and, not least, Ms. Soper’s lithe voice and riveting presence.

This disc is a handy reminder of the vital role that the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio has played in shaping today’s classical-music scene, nurturing artists like the violinist Jennifer Koh, the pianist Jeremy Denk, and members of the groups Eighth Blackbird and the International Contemporary Ensemble.

April 23, 2014

[I intended to post this here on Monday, but the DDoS hacker attack on Typepad put paid to that notion, so I posted this on Facebook. Here it is, in case you missed it before now.—Steve]

A new baby…a new work status…and now, a new job. What started with a simple email I received a few weeks ago has transformed with head-spinning speed into an opportunity I never saw coming, and obviously could not refuse.

On Monday, May 19, I report to work as the new Assistant Arts Editor of the Boston Globe.

My territory covers music – classical, popular and all shades in between – as well as visual art, for which I've had an intense lifelong passion. My new boss is Rebecca Ostriker. My remarkable colleagues will include Jeremy Eichler — just one of whose large shoes I stepped into at The New York Times in 2006 — as well as Matthew Guerrieri, David Weininger, James Reed, Sarah Rodman, Jon Garelick, Geoff A. Edgers and Sebastian Smee. To what extent I'll be writing remains to be seen in the short term, but anyone who knows me also knows that I can't clam up for long.

Lara and I have begun our hunt for a new domicile; I'm a bit stuck on Jamaica Plain, but we're certainly open to suggestion. I intend to be settled somewhere by Friday, May 16, with Lara, Annina, Bruno and Lola joining me as soon as feasible if not immediately.

Understand, my NYC friends, neighbors, comrades and colleagues, that I never envisioned leaving the city I've come to call home over the past 20 years. I hope you'll come up the highway to visit me from time to time, and I promise at some point to do the same. I also hope that we can see as many of you as we can during the next few weeks.

Farewell but not goodbye, New York City. And hey, Boston: let's dance.

April 15, 2014

Truth be told, there wasn't a lot happening on Monday or Tuesday night, thanks to the convergence of Holy Week and Tax Day. Still, late is late, and late is frustrating – I'm still trying to get the hang of a schedule in serious flux, and there are new developments afoot as well. So much for all that free time I was supposed to have when I ended my Time Out stint! I've got two official gigs for The New York Times this week, and they're both choice occasions.

Produced by composers for composers, this always intriguing festival gets underway with the American debut of Finnish new-music group Uusinta. The program includes one instantly appealing prospect, Hikari Kiyama's Jōruri Death Metal, "influenced by the unlikely bedfellows of metal, Brian Ferneyhough, and Japanese folk music," plus further works by Aaron Helgeson, Alexander Khubeev, Joan Arnau Pàmies, Ilari Kaila and Sampo Haapamäki. The festival continues through Monday, April 21, and there's something worth hearing every day.

Anthony Braxton's latest four-act opera receives its premiere in a semi-staged multimedia concert setting with vocal and instrumental soloists and orchestra. "I believe that the medium of opera is directly relevant to cultural alignment and evolution," says Braxton: a properly utopian viewpoint for this quixotic, vital venture. If a full day is too much Trillium, you can catch the four acts spread across two evenings on Thursday and Friday. Me, I'm in for the long haul, and hope to bring Annina to the matinee at the Tri-Centric Foundation's express invitation.

Robert Ashley and Alex WatermanVidas Perfectas at the Whitney Museum of American Art; 1:30 and 4:30pm (more)Also Friday, April 18 at 1:30 and 6:30pm; Saturday, April 19 and Sunday, April 20 at noon and 4:30pm; various segments at each performance

April 08, 2014

Monday night was a wash in more ways than one, given nasty weather outside and more than a few loose ends to tie up during my final week at Time Out New York. Still, there's lots to look forward to during the next six days, most of all the world premiere of Robert Ashley's final completed opera. Which brings me to my assignments for The New York Times, actually…

Official business

Saturday, April 12:CrashWhitney Museum of American Art; 4pm; $20, seniors and students $16Opens Thursday, April 10, at 4pm; also on Friday, April 11, at 6:30pm and Sunday, April 13, at 4pm

Said to be strikingly autobiographical in at least some respects, Crash is the last opera Robert Ashley completed before his death on March 3. He helped to supervise its preparation, I understand, but Alex Waterman is in charge of this Whitney Biennial presentation, and Tom Hamilton, the mage behind the mixer in so many of Ashley's pieces, is the music director. The cast, all younger performers who are helping to turn Ashley's idiosyncratic oeuvre into a durable, performable canon, includes Amirtha Kidambi and the five members of Varispeed Collective (Gelsey Bell, Brian McCorkle, Paul Pinto, Dave Ruder and Aliza Simons), all of whom have proved their mettle in previous Ashley affairs. Crash is the first of three Ashley presentations during the Whitney Biennial, which will also mount Vidas Perfectas (1983/2011) April 17-20, and The Trial of Anne Opie Wehrer and Unknown Accomplices for Crimes Against Humanity (1968) April 23-25.

Did you know that Stephen Hough was the first classical-music performer ever awarded a MacArthur Foundation "Genius grant"? I didn't, but I'm not surprised: Hough's an intelligent pianist, concert programmer and writer. This particular concert spans a post-Romantic gamut from Schoenberg backward to Liszt, with stops for late Brahms and three composers not closely linked to the piano: Bruckner, Wagner and Richard Strauss.

Elsewhere and -when

Tuesday, April 8:

David GrubbsRecords Ruin the Landscape book launch at Issue Project Room; 8pm (more)

One remarkably broad span of avant-garde piano, from Ludwig van Beethoven to Michael Pisaro. The playing was brilliant, the instrument outstanding, and I've never heard a better mix of piano, electronics and amplification than during van Houdt's program, the Pisaro and Luc Ferrari pieces in particular.

Two subsequent revelations: Via Facebook, I learned that the Alvin Curran piece that ended van Houdt's second set was in fact discreetly amplified, something that evidently neither I nor van Houdt noticed, so subtly was it enacted. And via email, I learned that Greenberg's rendition of Helmut Lachenmann's treacherous Serynade was his first public performance of the work. Look forward to more chances to hear it, and to hear it grow in Greenberg's hands.

This one came out really, really quickly, despite some hair-splitting fact-checking that ran up to deadline hour. Once I had that lede – don't ask me where it came from; I just accepted its arrival – the rest of the review just fell into place as it needed to.

Given conversations going on among many of my more music-literate friends following Ted Gioia's recent Daily Beast article about music criticism degenerating into lifestyle reporting, arguably I could have spoken more exactly and in greater detail about the structural makings of Stetson's songs, especially as regards the choral component. But when you're faced with a tight word count, a looming deadline and a general audience, those aren't always the first things that occur to you. Should they be? That's worth thinking about. (If the notion is resonant for you, DO NOT miss this Owen Pallett analysis of Katy Perry's "Teenage Dream" on Slate.)

I do hope that Stetson will complete his wondrous arrangement of Gorecki's Symphony No. 3, and his colleagues from this concert's second half will commit the whole thing to disc. I could very easily imagine it being something that would really work on the Constellation label, for which Stetson already records – the arrangement is faithful to Gorecki, yet for me it also had an unmistakeable whiff of postrock à la Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Explosions in the Sky or Mono.

March 22, 2014

The biggest surprise about this particular concert was the fact that I was there; I'd originally been scheduled to cover a different event, but a sick colleague prompted a last-minute shuffle, and here we are. Because of a last-minute space crunch, a few things were excised from the review without my knowledge. I reckon that at least a few people might be interested in the bits that were lost.

First, the paragraph about Masada numerology originally ended with an interesting announcement.

The reason? 215 plus 306 plus 92 equals 613, the number of commandments that Jews are obliged to observe, according to the Torah. A 614th commandment introduced after World War II, he added, will prompt a final, long-form Masada composition that he intends to write next year.

Keen-eyed Zornithologists will note that the first two numbers are actually 205 plus 316, a point we quickly corrected. My original draft as submitted and edited also identified the trio of Steve Lehman, Vijay Iyer and Tyshawn Sorey by their collective name, Fieldwork.

Finally, lost entirely in the cut was my final paragraph. While there's no way that I could have cited all the worthy performers who participated in Zorn's shuffle-concert, I did in fact name more than saw print. These things happen all the time, and no hard feelings – but for those who might be curious, here's the original ending.

Many Arms, a Philadelphia trio, read “Panim” in a manner that recalled the Nels Cline Trio in its punk-jazz-vinyl salad days. The guitarist Gyan Riley and the art-rock band Secret Chiefs 3 wrested adrenalized fusion from their respective selections. The singer Sofia Rei brought out a throaty romantic sway in “Setumah.” And Zion80, a joyous ensemble that usually patches Shlomo Carlebach’s songs into Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat template, found “Hod” amenable to its positively Zornian hybrid approach.